Who’da thunk that commemorative events surrounding the sinking of the Titanic would cause an uptick in the demand for pate de foie gras, but that’s the sad truth. You just can’t escape cruelty, and the intervention of 100 years hasn’t brought on the evolution of enlightenment. Seems that every place from my blue-collar Hoosier hometown (pop. 32,400) to New York City’s St. Regis hotel to a Hong Kong establishment is recreating the last meal served on the doomed ship. “The idea is to recreate the ambience on the ship,” said the chef at Hong Kong’s Hullett House. “It’s for people who want to be somewhere else.”

Oh how one wishes that “somewhere else” could be one of the hellholes where ducks and geese suffer forced feedings, organ damage, and unending pain only to be slaughtered for their diseased “fatty livers.” How one wishes that the fine ladies in their furs and feathers and the gentlemen in their impeccable tuxedos could witness in person the torment of too much force-fed grain pumped into the stomachs (called “gavage”) of immobilized birds. A girl can dream, can’t she?

Foie gras, whose production has been challenged in court, is “revered as one of the most exquisite foods in the world” by gourmands. It is but a decadent, gustatory bauble for the one per cent (and wannabes)–one whose price is off the scale in pain and suffering. To her credit, Kate Winslet, leading lady in the Cameron production of “Titanic,” worked with PETA to expose the cruelty of foie gras in a YouTube video. The revealing film footage, shot surreptitiously, is of the very sort that has been criminalized by state legislatures (two so far–Iowa and Utah) at the behest of their ag-industry overlords.

Foie gras will disappear from California menus on July first, when a state-wide ban signed by Gov. Schwarzenegger in 2004 goes into effect. Wrote Wolfgang Puck to fellow restaurateurs in the Golden State,

As a chef, a businessman, and someone who cares about the humane treatment of animals, I’m writing to let you know why I support this particular law, and why I hope you’ll give it your full support, as well…We chefs have the ability to create delicious and original dishes our customers will love without causing torment to animals. –from “Forbidden Foie Gras”

Others defend the dish as a 5000-year-old culinary tradition, asserting that the gavage phase, which lasts about 18 days prior to slaughter, is nothing more than a “facsimile” of a bird’s natural feeding prior to a physically-demanding migration. Oh, and let’s not forget that old exploiter’s standby, the “They’re Not Like Us” argument:

…it’s unrealistic and somewhat silly to apply human physiology to a migratory bird. You’re dealing with an animal that stores fat in its liver for long journeys in migration. You’re also dealing with an animal that has no gag reflex and is basically feature made to be able to swallow whole fish. So I think the issue begins when people start to humanize their anatomy and say, ‘Well, I don’t want a tube stuck down my throat.’ But we’re not built the same way they are; we’re not made to swallow fish whole. –from “Good Taste: Quietly fighting foie gras ban“

Most of us aren’t made to swallow animal cruelty whole, either, though a great many humans manage to ignore the inconvenient reality of industrial animal production where their “normal” food–animals like pigs, chickens, and cattle–is concerned.

But a so-called luxury item like foie gras is just such as easy target; it would be a shame to forego taking another shot at it given the Titanic hoopla playing out today and tomorrow. One assumes there were no vegans on board–indeed, the word vegan wasn’t coined until 1944. But had there been, they might have requested “faux gras” as a substitute for the real–and cruelty-saturated–thing.

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Ten courses! I’ve never wanted to go on a cruise, and now I can see why. The extravagant, endless meal sounds like the epitome of one of the seven deadly sins: gluttony.

I realize that most of the 918 crew members weren’t served this fare, and possibly only a handful of the 112 children aboard ate it.

Nonetheless, if all 1,174 adult passengers sat down to the feast, that means upwards of 5,000 oysters, 1,200 pigeons, the same number of salmon, broiler chickens, egg-laying hens, ducks (for foie gras) and ducklings, and countless little lambs and big steers were enslaved, tortured, terrified, and killed for humans’ fleeting gustatory pleasure. In addition, a great many lactating cows were deprived of their babies to produce gallons of milk for cream of barley soup, creamed carrots, eclairs, and ice cream.

Sadder still, because the ship hit the iceberg during dinner, most of the animals lost their lives in vain twice over: not only did they not deserve to be bred-for-killing in the first place, but their wasted carcasses sat uneaten on the fine bone china plates. Their anonymous, unmourned, cut-up and cooked bodies sank to the ocean bottom alongside hundreds of fellow-beings whose lost lives were counted and whose names were remembered.

I’m not making light of the loss of humans. I’m pointing out that the tragedy was multiplied by the violence perpetrated on equally innocent animals.

As for foie gras being on 100th anniversary menus, I have a hard time distinguishing the brutality behind that delicacy from the abuse inherent in eating any animal’s flesh and fluids. I pity those who remain oblivious to their titanic-size complicity in cruelty, whether it comes in a ten-course gourmet dinner or a Happy Meal.